ccess. You can see
it's like all surprises. One side is prepared before the other side
knows there is danger. Without regard to relative numbers, the odds
are all in favor of the road agents."

"But I wouldn't sit still, whatever the odds," asserted his lordship.
"And no Englishman would."

"Well, Lord Ralles," I said, "I hope for your sake, then, that you'll
never be in a hold-up, for I should feel about you as the runner of a
locomotive did when the old lady asked him if it was'nt very painful
to him to run over people. 'Yes, madam,' he sadly replied: 'there is
nothing musses an engine up so.'"

I don't think Miss Cullen liked Lord Ralles's comments on American
courage any better than I did, for she said--you take Lord Ralles
and Captain Ackland into the service of the K. & A., Mr. Gordon, as a
special guard?"

"The K. & A. has never had a robbery yet, Miss Cullen," I replied,
"and I don't think that it ever will have."

"Why not?" she asked.

I explained to her how the Canon of the Colorado to the north, and the
distance of the Mexican border to the south, made escape so almost
desperate that the road agents preferred to devote their attentions to
other routes. "If we were boarded, Miss Cullen," I said, "your jewelry
would be as safe as it is in Chicago, for the robbers would only clean
out the express and mail-cars; but if they should so far forget their
manners as to take your trinkets, I'd agree to return them to you
inside of one week."

"That makes it all the jollier," she cried, eagerly. "We could have
the fun of the adventure, and yet not lose anything. Can't you arrange
for it, Mr. Gordon?"

"I'd like to please you, Miss Cullen," I said, "and I'd like to give
Lord Ralles a chance to show us how to handle those gentry; but it's
not to be done." I really should have been glad to have the road
agents pay us a call.

We spent that day pulling up the Raton pass, and so on over the
Glorietta pass down to Lamy, where, as the party wanted to see Sante
Fe, I had our two cars dropped off the overland, and we ran up the
branch line to the old Mexican city. It was well-worn ground to me,
but I enjoyed showing the sights to Miss Cullen, for by that time I
had come to the conclusion that I had never met a sweeter or jollier
girl. Her beauty, too, was of a kind that kept growing on one, and
before I had known her twenty-four hours, without quite being in love
with her, I was beginning to hate Lord Ralles, which